This blog continues to share ideas and hopes to generate discussion on social business, knowledge management, and emerging technologies. It also increasingly covers my home, New Orleans, my painting, and travels.

“Building and supporting community is a powerful way to build leadership relationships, connect with customers to improve service and accelerate innovation or transform internal organizational productivity. Yet sometimes organizations grab a packaged-off-the-shelf community offering and launch a site and find that it is not gaining the engagement and adoption that was hoped for. If you’re thinking of building an online community or have started on the path, but are not sure you have all the elements in place, this session will provide you with a roadmap to community strategy, planning, launch and early stage adoption, and engagement practices.

The session will guide you through a community strategy process that is aligned with the business strategy, identifying and surveying stakeholders, accurately assessing and clarifying the unmet needs of the community stakeholders to drive the user experience, content and programming plans. Using a case example of an online community for education leaders, the session speaker will outline considerations for staffing and resourcing a community, engaging constituencies through social media, marketing and communications efforts for adoption engagement, analytics and Key Performance Indicator development to assess health of the community.”

Catherine pointed out the changes in the conference that reflect changes in the importance of online communities. In 2007 there was only one session on communities and now it is a major theme. She began with why communities matter from a strategic perspective. She showed some research that shows the change in relative asset base of S&P companies shifted from tangible assets to intangible assets. In 1982 38% of assets were intangible. In 1999 84% of assets were intangible and I am sure it is higher now. This is a major transformation. However, companies still relate to their workforce as though it was 1950 and focus on top down management build on running a company based on tangible assets. Now the value in companies lies in the ability to connect people to optimize their intangible assets but this is largely untapped. Communities are a major way to do this.

Now we have the networked enterprise, using McKinsey term. They found quantified margins gains in companies that were networked. There are many quantified benefits. There are many quantified benefits. First 77% said the tools increased the speed of access to knowledge, 60% said they reduced communication coats, 52% said they increased speed of access to internal experts, 44% found a reduction in travel costs, and 40% found increased employee satisfaction. For more detail see - Enterprise 2.0 Finds Its Pay Day – McKinsey and How social technologies are extending the organization.

In last few years some companies have embraced external facing communities to extend their relationships with their partners and customers. She gave an example of a 21-year-old neighbor who learns everything to work on his car through an online community. Also, companies that use communities inside the enterprise can benefit. Companies often focus on solely on major efforts. Communities can help pick up the smaller, more incremental improvements to complement the major efforts. Communities can be a low cost way to improve your business results on an ongoing basis.

Next she went over some community principles. First you need to bring your stakeholders into lifecycle of a community. Communities have a unique set of dynamics: These include: Participation, Collective Transparency, Independence, Persistence, and Emergence.

Catherine quoted Philip Evans and Bob Wolf in the Harvard Busienss Review article, Collaboration Rules, “where trust is the currency, reputation is the source of power.”

Catherine offered a research-based community lifecycle: inception, establishment, growth, and maturity. Each stage has considerations for growth stewardship and growth. You need active community management and executive leadership at each stage.

In stage one you need to engage and education your stakeholders: identify strategic business alignment: plan for inception & establishment; determine critical success factors and KPIs for early phases; and lay groundwork & infrastructure for growth and maturity phases

A key first step is to identify your business strategy and create alignment with community. Internal and external facing communities have different sets of goals. For example external; communities often look at customer engagement and revenue and internal communities look at productivity increases.

She next offered a community business model. Then she provided a sample community architecture. The main sections include: Community Management; Content and Events Programming; Social Media, Marketing, Communications; Platform UX, Analytics; Operations, and Governance.

Community management is a key component and this is a new breed of business management. This role remains vital throughout the four life cycles. Another role is expert curation. When you are creating a community you need to bring relevant content to offer value to the members to provide value and give them something to discuss and expand on.

In stage two – establishment, you need to cultivate and facilitate along a spectrum of engagement, the active contributors, the passive contributors, and lurkers. You need to establish recognition to encourage volunteer engagement. There needs to be a regular cadence of events, programs, and communications. You need to refine resource requirements for growth. You need internal and eternal; advocacy, partnerships in place, and active cycle of engagement, analytics aligned with business purpose, and benchmarking along with active listening.

She next offered a cycle of engagement where content is feed into the community; it is refreshed through conversations; social media is used for additional relevant content discovery, and the cycle is repeated.

Then Catherine covered the growth stage. Now the community needs to have a shared sense of ownership. There needs to volunteer programs and empowered leaders, and the UX and analytic evolves with sophistication of community engagement.

June 12, 2012

My Merced Group partner, Catherine Shinners will present at next week’s Enterprise 2.0 on " Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning, and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption.” Her session is at 11:15 – 12 on Tuesday June 19 in Room 312. Here is the description.

“Building and supporting community is a powerful way to build leadership relationships, connect with customers to improve service and accelerate innovation or transform internal organizational productivity. Yet sometimes organizations grab a packaged-off-the-shelf community offering and launch a site and find that it is not gaining the engagement and adoption that was hoped for. If you’re thinking of building an online community or have started on the path, but are not sure you have all the elements in place, this session will provide you with a roadmap to community strategy, planning, launch and early stage adoption, and engagement practices.

The session will guide you through a community strategy process that is aligned with the business strategy, identifying and surveying stakeholders, accurately assessing and clarifying the unmet needs of the community stakeholders to drive the user experience, content and programming plans. Using a case example of an online community for education leaders, the session speaker will outline considerations for staffing and resourcing a community, engaging constituencies through social media, marketing and communications efforts for adoption engagement, analytics and Key Performance Indicator development to assess health of the community.”

It is part of a great community management track created by Rachel Happe. Hope to see you there. I will be blogging the conference.

March 29, 2012

Our team at Merced Group brings together seasoned and wide-ranging experience in helping companies implement enhanced collaboration into their business systems, processes and culture to generate new value, maximize the potential of their workforce and partners and deepen customer relationships. We were doing social business years before the current buzzwords were coined.

In the course of our work, we’ve collaborated with many highly skilled people with unique and valued expertise. We’re now featuring some of the firms that we can bring into projects to meet specific client needs. You can view more extended network of colleagues in the partner tab on our Web site.

AlignConsulting helps organizations channel insight into action. Putting conversation back into the center of strategy and process improvement, we harness untapped knowledge to solve business problems. We apply on-line and off-line facilitation techniques based on our book Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam (Wiley, 2011). These help organizations and networks to accelerate innovation, integrate mergers and acquisitions, transform internal and customer-facing functions, and enlighten social media initiatives.

Bock & Company focuses on digital strategies for content and collaboration, including social media. The firm advises enterprises on the essential activities for creating, organizing, publishing, and syndicating digitized information to build customer experiences.

Real Time Strategy is a general management consultancy serving the strategy development and implementation needs of Non-Profits, Private Companies and Public Corporations. We help clients craft and implement integrated, adaptable solutions to their business challenges. Our proven success in strategy development and implementation ensures the course we help you chart delivers the results you need quickly, reliably and cost effectively.

The Softjoe Collaborative delivers engagement solutions, using social and collaborative platforms to deliver internal, external and mixed networks that drive productivity, responsiveness and engagement.

Sympraxis Consulting LLC focuses on enabling collaboration by developing solutions to improve collaboration within teams, with outside partners, and across the enterprise using the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Sympraxis also assists organizations with collaboration strategies, planning, design, change management, and managing follow on challenges. With our wide range of experience delivering proven solutions in many industries, we can help you quickly and painlessly realize the potential of these technologies no matter the size of your organization.

January 16, 2012

Social business has great potential and I have shared much of my excitement over its opportunities, as well as ideas for its success on this blog. I am now pleased to announce that I have joined with Catherine Shinners and the Merced Group as a partner. The Merced Group provides business strategy, program design, and implementation services to companies and organizations on social business efforts. The services we offer include: online communities, enterprise collaboration, social media marketing, as well as product marketing and management.

I have been doing some consulting over the past few years on an informal basis, along with my other activities, and this move provides an organization and channel for my consulting going forward. I also plan to get more involved in consulting now, putting into practice all that I have learned in the social business space, both inside the enterprise on the Web.

I chose to partner with Catherine because we have complementary skills and she has an established practice in the social business space. Catherine brings both collaboration expertise and a technology background to bear in her practice. She has helped clients successfully position and market new products, build authentic customer relationships through online communities and create compelling online user experiences for productive collaboration. She writes the Cathexis blog.

Catherine has been based in Palo Alto for the past 23 years and has held senior director level positions in product management, product marketing, business development and marketing at such firms as: WebEx, Tandem, and Compaq. She developed new lines of business in enterprise software for internet infrastructure solutions for the financial services and telecommunications market, led go-to-market efforts for Web-based business solutions, identified and structured business and technology partnerships and successfully launched Web 2.0 and SaaS online services for collaboration software.

One of her recent Merced Group projects was the creation of a community strategy and management of the ongoing program of a strategic, global corporate social responsibility initiative that engaged a select executive management clientele in the education sector. It currently has close to 2500 member sin over 100 countries. The online community program (www.getideas.org) provided education leaders a collaboration environment to advance 21st century innovation and transformation in education and received a 2011 Computerworld Honors Laureate award in the collaboration category.

I will remain connected with Darwin Ecosystems and a part of the team. I am also continuing to provide software reviews on the AppGap blog. I am excited about this new direction and look forward to writing more about it as it evolves.